18.MyISERN-1.1

Milestone 1.1.1015

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What was difficult about this assignment?
The difficult part of this assignment was delegating all the work so that we would not get in each other's way or spend all of our time doing the same task. Also, when multiple are programming the same system, it is difficult to make everything consistent and easily readable. While we do share the same ant tasks such as PMD, CheckStyle, and FindBugs, the actual code that we write may not necessarily be consistent. One of us might choose to use a void method, while the rest of us use methods that return strings for instance. This type of inconsistency can make code very difficult to debug and read at times. I found that I had to spend a good amount of time making our code as consistent as possible so that it was more readable and easier to debug and change.

What problems were encountered in organizing the group and carrying out the work?
We divided up the various tasks into distinct issues. Since each issue was pretty much independent of the other issues, we assigned one person to work on each issue. The problem with this approach though, was that because only one person was working on each task, if the person ran into trouble, then no one else was working on that issue. I'm not sure if it would have been better for everyone to work on the same issue using the XP approach. During our in-person meetings we used that approach to do some of the tasks and it turned out pretty well. The only problem is during the in-person meetings, we only have one computer so it is a little inefficient.

Were all of the assigned tasks completed? If not, why not?
All of the tasks were completed successfully.

What will you do differently during the next Milestone to improve the process and the product of your efforts?
For the next Milestone, instead of just dividing up the work, I (our group) will attempt to divide the work to better cater to our strengths. I think this will help us to better use our time and will make achieving the next milestone far easier, since hopefully it will be a much more efficient process. Also, I think we will try having one person work on the main method and testing, and the other two people working on the task methods. This will allow the code to be more consistent and easier to debug and change. Another possibility is to define team standards that we will use to program, so that everything will be as similar as possible.